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Go on a (virtual) global ice cream tour
Here are 13 different types of ice cream you can find across the globe. Perhaps you’ll even be inspired to try making some of these unique treats at home!
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Gelato | Italy
Gelato, Italy’s most famous type of ice cream, comes in a variety of flavors and generally has a denser consistency and more potent flavor (but is less creamy) than its American counterpart. When ordering gelato, it’s perfectly acceptable to have multiple flavors crammed into a single cone or cup, which makes answering questions like “mango or pistachio?” much easier.
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Ice cream mochi | Japan
Japanese dessert lovers have managed to combine a favored local sweet, mochi, and ice cream into a single tasty bite. These two-bite-sized morsels are made by stuffing pastel-colored balls of pounded sticky rice with various flavors of ice cream (green tea, anyone?) which are then coated in a fine white powder.
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Helado | Argentina
Argentina’s frozen treat, helado, is creamy, rich and piled so high on a cone that sticky drips are a constant threat. It comes in multiple flavors, with dulce de leche being a national favorite.
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Ais Kacang | Malaysia
Malaysia gets mighty hot, and to cool off, locals turn to a take on shaved ice known as ais kacang. A heaping stack of shaved ice gets topped with an often colorful and sometimes bewildering assortment of ingredients: things like grass jelly, sweet corn, palm nuts, diced fruit, aloe vera, condensed milk and a whole host of sweet flavored syrups.
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Clotted cream ice cream | England
Cornwall in England is famous for its clotted cream, made by heating full-fat cow’s milk in a steam or water bath and allowing it to cool slowly until cream clots rise to the surface. This high fat cream, when made into ice cream, is about as creamy and deliciously rich as it gets.
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Halva ice cream | Israel
For a sweet icy treat in Israel, order a halva ice cream. Halva, a sweet treat made from smashing sesame seeds into a paste and sweetening with honey, seems an ideal ice cream ingredient. Sure enough, during a hot Tel Aviv summer afternoon, you’ll find locals and tourists alike cooling off with halva ice cream.
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Dondurma | Turkey
Turkey’s traditional ice cream, called dondurma, has a characteristic stretchy, taffy-like consistency, and when you take a bite, it’s firm and chewy rather than creamy and melty. Vendors selling the confection often put on a show for passers-by, demonstrating the dondurma’s amazing ability to stretch and stay on the end of the long stick used to serve it.
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Kulfi | India
More like a frozen custard than an ice cream, India’s kulfi is made from sweetened condensed milk mixed with any number of flavor add-ins. Local favorites you should try: saffron, mango, cardamom or pistachio.
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Spaghettieis | Germany
Be careful what you eat in Germany; what looks like spaghetti might actually be ice cream. Spaghettieis, a creative concoction made from passing vanilla ice cream through a potato ricer and topping it with strawberry sauce and white chocolate shavings, has become a popular novelty dessert in Germany since the 1960s.
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Akutaq | Alaska, U.S.A.
Akutaq, also known as Alaskan ice cream, was traditionally made with animal fat combined with sugar and wild berries. Today, this dessert popular in Alaska comes in many varieties, most made from whipped Crisco combined with blueberries, cranberries, salmonberries, crowberries or cloudberries.
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Frozen yogurt | U.S.A.
Born from the American low-fat craze, frozen yogurt is giving traditional ice cream a run for its money as the nation’s favorite frozen dessert, as is evidenced by shops selling fro-yo popping up in pretty much every city from coast to coast.
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Tartufo | Italy
Italy might be most famous for gelato, but that’s certainly not the only style of ice cream to be found in this Mediterranean destination. ‘Tartufo’ is the Italian word for truffle, and your typical tartufo is made from a ball of vanilla ice cream stuffed with a cherry and ground nuts, then dipped in chocolate and either more nuts or chocolate shavings.
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Frozen custard | U.S.A.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin has become the unofficial frozen custard capital of the world, and every local has his or her favorite custard stand. While it looks a lot like ice cream, frozen custard is made from cream and egg yolks, and is typically denser than normal ice cream.
10Best is a part of the USA TODAY Network, providing an authentically local point of view on destinations around the world, in addition to travel and lifestyle advice.